Coinbase Custody has become the first Coinbase product to provide support for Ripple (XRP). The announcement of Ripple coming to Coinbase Custody was made in October 2018 - and it officially arrived on to the platform late last week. This is a significant development as the company had shied away from supporting Ripple on any of their products for so long.
Earlier this year, rumours were rampant that Coinbase and GDAX (now known as Coinbase Pro) platforms were likely to add support for Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency. However, after months of rumours early on in the year, the company clarified that this was not the case and that they will officially announce as and when they have plans to introduce a new currency. This news was making the rounds at a time when the crypto markets were going through a ‘bloodbath’ phase and helped Ripple surge past the $1 mark for a brief period of time. However, the price of the currency crashed once again when Coinbase clarified.
Nevertheless, Ripple (XRP) has now become the ninth name to be listed on the Coinbase Custody platform. Before the addition of Ripple, the platform supported Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), 0x (ZRX), OmiseGo (OMG) and Basic Attention Token (BAT).
In the past, Coinbase was quite reserved about the kind of currencies that they were willing to list on their platform. However, over the past few months they have relaxed their policies by quite a bit and are open to listing a number of new coins and tokens across their offerings. Earlier this year, the company announced their support for ERC-20 tokens. Coinbase then stated that the USDC stablecoin would be added on to its platforms soon.
Coinbase Custody is a digital asset custody platform that Coinbase offers, allowing their customers to store their cryptocurrencies in cold storage, along with an insurance on the safety of the currency. This is particularly a tool created for high net-worth individuals and institutional investors, as is evident by it’s minimum balance of $10 Million and has a setup fee of $100,000.
The addition of Ripple on Coinbase Custody is likely to attract a large number of institutional investors towards the service. Ripple is an attractive crypto asset for investors, especially following the currency’s dramatic 36,000% boom late last year. While Ripple is far away from such impressive numbers, it continues to be a popular investment option in the markets - and has of late surpassed Ethereum to become the second largest cryptocurrency in the cryptocurrency markets in terms of market capitalization.
However, for now Ripple is only supported on Coinbase Custody - and on no other Coinbase product. Basically, this means that while an investor can make use of Coinbase Custody to store their investment in Ripple (XRP), they cannot make use of any Coinbase service to actually buy the currency. Apart from Ripple OmiseGo (OMG) is the only other token which shares a similar characteristic in Coinbase Custody.
Stay tuned with us at Cryptoground for all the latest updates and news stories from the world of cryptocurrencies.
